As a reporter, I’ve always been most comfortable writing. Not speaking on stage. Not appearing on video. Not moderating panels in front of hundreds of people. My job was to put other people in the spotlight.
But I was hyper-aware that those were skills I needed to gain if I wanted to have a career in media. The problem was that the mere thought of an on-stage interview in front of a live audience gave me heart palpitations.
As I was preparing, I had a memory of my high school acting teacher saying, “Before you step on that stage, you have to get into character. You’ve got to talk like that person, act like that person, and feel the emotions that person feels.”
I remember studying my monologue for weeks before getting up in front of my classmates. Two seconds before my “performance,” I thought I was going to throw up. But then something weird happened — it felt like someone else took over as soon as I opened my mouth. The nerves went away, and I felt confident because I wasn’t up there as the introverted Polina. I was up there as my very outgoing character.
Fast forward 10 years, I was sitting in my apartment determined to try the same technique. I watched countless videos of journalists and talk show hosts interviewing people in front of an audience. They were larger than life, they had open body language, they made jokes, and they had loads of energy. They seemed like an exaggerated version of themselves.
So I decided that I would step into a similar character when I was on stage. I wouldn’t be me — I would perform as someone so confident that nerves couldn’t phase them. That shift in mindset changed my voice, my posture, and my confidence level.
I had never found the right language to describe this phenomenon, but here’s how Beyoncé put it: “That moment when you’re nervous and that other thing kind of takes over for you.”
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“That other thing” is often referred to as an “alter ego.” Believe it or not, early in her career, Beyoncé was shy and reserved, which is antithetical to the powerhouse we saw on stage.
That’s because she created an alter ego she called ‘Sasha Fierce’ that allowed her to perform with a level of confidence she herself didn’t yet have. “I’m not like her in real life at all,” Beyoncé said. “I’m not flirtatious and super-confident and fearless like her.”
Inspired by Beyoncé, Adele did something similar to help deal with her nerves.
In a 2011 Rolling Stone profile, the superstar opened up about her severe stage fright. “I’m scared of audiences,” she said. “I get shitty scared. One show in Amsterdam, I was so nervous I escaped out the fire exit. I’ve thrown up a couple of times. Once in Brussels, I projectile-vomited on someone ... I have anxiety attacks a lot.”
She created an alter ego called ‘Sasha Carter’ — a composite of Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce and country music star June Carter — in effort to calm her internal terror before going on stage. Here’s why she created her new persona:
“I was about to meet Beyoncé, and I had a full-blown anxiety attack. Then she popped in looking gorgeous, and said, ‘You’re amazing! When I listen to you I feel like I’m listening to God.’ Can you believe she said that?” Later, “I went out on the balcony crying hysterically, and I said, ‘What would Sasha Fierce do?’ That’s when Sasha Carter was born.”
The legendary British actor Rowan Atkinson was bullied as a child for having a stutter. But his speech impediment mysteriously went away when he was performing on stage. “I find when I play a character other than myself, the stammering disappears,” he says. “That may have been some of the inspiration for pursuing the career I did.”
Research supports these mental tricks we play on ourselves. Adopting an alter ego is an extreme form of “self-distancing,” a psychological tool that helps people reason more objectively and see the situation from a slight distance.
Immersing yourself in your feelings can lead to unhealthy mental rumination, so creating a little bit of distance from the self can help us better regulate our emotions. One way people can create a temporary alter ego is through illeism, which is defined as “the act of referring to oneself in the third person.”
It might seem odd to talk about yourself in the third person, but athletes, politicians, and business figures do it all the time. One famous example of illeism in action was basketball star LeBron James talking about his decision to leave Cleveland for the Miami Heat. He says, “I wanted to do what was best for LeBron James, and what LeBron James was going to do to make him happy.”
Illeism is not generally well-received as it makes the subject sound arrogant, but it can be a powerful tool if used for the purpose of reducing anxiety and building confidence. “There are studies that show when people talk about previous traumatic events in the third person, they tend to regard themselves through much more compassionate eyes,” says psychotherapist Kim Schneiderman.
In other words, a distanced perspective can help soothe anxiety and fear by allowing us to muster up confidence for the moments that matter.
The point is that you’re not permanently tethered to the identity you currently have — you can alter it to get closer to the person you want to become. “Your current behaviors are simply a reflection of your current identity,” James Clear writes. “What you do now is a mirror image of the type of person you believe that you are (either consciously or subconsciously).”
So how do you build a new identity? Clear says you need identity-based habits, ones that make you believe new things about yourself. In a guest post for The Profile, Clear wrote, “Take whatever goal you are trying to accomplish and ask yourself, ‘Who is the type of person that could achieve that goal?’” If you want to be a better writer, become the type of person who writes 1,000 words every day. If you want to be strong, become the type of person who never misses a workout.
Here’s the cool part: In the beginning, your core self and your alter ego may seem like two disparate entities. But over time, they begin to blend together.
As you can imagine, Beyoncé doesn’t need the crutch of an alter persona to get through her performances anymore. She’s become confident just being herself. “Sasha Fierce is done. I killed her,” Beyoncé told Allure in 2010. “I don't need Sasha Fierce anymore, because I've grown, and now I'm able to merge the two.”
I’ll leave you with this quote from actor Cary Grant: “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until, finally, I became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point along the way.”
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PROFILES.
— The Facebook billionaire’s second act [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The TikTok founder dealing with a new reality
— The rocket scientist who created a love prediction algorithm
— The conscience of Silicon Valley
— The contrarian who keeps being right
— The CEO that won over the TikTok army
— The jet-setting insurance fraudster
— The nursing home at the epicenter of the pandemic
— The company that buckled during COVID-19
PEOPLE TO KNOW.
The Facebook billionaire’s second act: A decade ago, Mark Zuckerberg’s college roommate became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire by helping co-found Facebook. Now, Dustin Moskovitz, 36, is worth $14.2 billion, and he’s been quietly working behind the scenes to build up Asana, a cloud-based work-collaboration app. As the company pursues a direct listing this fall, take a look inside its “anti-Facebook” company-building approach. (Forbes)
“If this problem wasn’t worth solving or wasn’t a viable business, I’d just stop.”
The TikTok founder dealing with a new reality: Zhang Yiming, a 37-year-old admirer of Silicon Valley, always wanted the company he created to be seen as global. He never thought his goofy dancing video app TikTok would be dragged into the center of a tense U.S.-China geopolitical relationship. Meet the man who started it all. (WSJ; Reply to this email if you can’t access this story.)
“An entrepreneur doesn’t have a country. When they develop something, it’s just not for any particular market, it’s for people globally.”
The rocket scientist who created a love prediction algorithm: Do you know your true value on the dating market? An engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab computed a relationship prediction formula. Rashied Amini’s Nanaya app provides clients with a report on their love chances, quantifying the multiple uncertainties of love. How do you know when you’ve found someone good enough? Mathematically, the question of when to settle is more complex than how to find a partner. This one is fascinating. (WIRED)
“The average time people stay single changes based on all these different aspects of identity and lifestyle.”
The conscience of Silicon Valley: Tech oracleJaron Lanier was early to the idea that social platforms like Facebook and Twitter were addictive and even harmful—that their algorithms made people feel bad, divided them against one another, and actually changed who they were. “The sway of media is more powerful than the experience of reality,” he says. Here’s why he believes social media is rotting our brains now more than every before. (GQ)
“In the information age, we're all workers and consumers and entrepreneurs at the same time.”
The contrarian who keeps being right: Zeynep Tufekci, a computer scientist who became a sociologist, has gone largely against mainstream opinion in the last decade, and she’s been right time and time again. In 2011, she said the case for Twitter as a driver of broad social movements had been oversimplified. In 2012, she warned news media outlets that their coverage of school shootings could inspire more. In 2020, she encouraged people to wear masks when the CDC was advising against them. How does she keep getting the complicated things right? (The New York Times)
“She was very prescient in seeing that there would be a deeper rot to the role of data-driven politics in our world.”
The CEO that won over the TikTok army: Chris Hulls runs a company called Life360, which makes an app that allows users to share their current location with each other. Parents can use it to keep tabs on their kids … and their kids tend not to like that. When a coalition of TikTok teens descended on his app, they dragged its overall rating on the App Store from 4.7 to 2.6 by the end of March. Hulls realized he couldn’t beat his Gen-Z detractors — so he hired them. (WSJ; Reply to this email if you can’t access this story.)
“I believe kids need a little bit of privacy and a little bit of freedom to make choices.”
The jet-setting insurance fraudster: T.R. Wright was described as a guy who “liked to kick the tires and light the fires.” His acquaintances knew him as a hotshot in flip-flops and shorts who’d cruise around in Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Porsches. All in all, he had around $35 million in fraudulent insurance claims around the world. Here’s how Wright pulled off the wildest insurance fraud scheme in Texas history. (Texas Monthly)
“He was always looking for something that had a story.”
COMPANIES TO WATCH.
The nursing home at the epicenter of the pandemic: The Life Care Center of Kirkland, Wash., made headlines around the world earlier this year as the first COVID hotspot in the U.S. While nursing-home residents represent just a fraction of 1% of the American population, they account for more than a quarter of total pandemic deaths. This heart-shattering investigation in the Life Care Center facility exposes just how ill-prepared we were for the pandemic — and how we take care of our elderly. (California Sunday)
“Are the facilities totally blameless? In which case we just need to help them. Or did some of them make mistakes? In which case something needs to change.”
The company that buckled during COVID-19: 3M, a 118-year-old manufacturing company, is best known for Scotch tape, sandpaper, and Post-It notes. The company owns some 120,000 patents, and sells some 55,000 products. So how did a much-admired all-American sticky-paper company end up being publicly cast as a pandemic villain? The answer: N95 masks. (Marker)
“A lot of us were exhausted. We had to make room for crying time.”
This installment of The Profile is free for everyone. If you would like to get full access to all of the recommendations, including today’s audio and video sections, sign up below.
AUDIO TO HEAR.
Balaji Srinivasan on improving your content diet: Many of you have heard me refer to “improving your content diet,” meaning that you should be conscious of the quality of information you consume on a daily basis. In this podcast episode, entrepreneur and angel investor Balaji Srinivasan goes deep on why many of us choose to consume “junk food” or “info-tainment” when it comes to the media that we consume. “I feel that Twitter and a lot of the social media are like restaurants that have learned to put sugar in our food,” he says. “It’s meant to provoke an extreme emotional reaction, and it’s coming in through our eyes and ears.” This is a wild conversation. (Link available to premium members.)
Katrina Lake on the future of buying apparel:Katrina Lake, the founder and CEO of personal styling company Stitch Fix, believes that data science is the foundation of her business. She’s hired astrophysicists to build recommendation algorithms and data models for the company. She says the cold hard data has helped augment the creativity of the human stylist, which has been instrumental to Stitch Fix selling more than $5 billion of clothing. (Link available to premium members.)
Malcolm Galdwell on cultivating tolerance: When we meet a stranger, we have a weird desire to reduce them to a single, non-contradictory person. “It’s crazy,” he says. The beauty of being human is that we contain a multitude of contradictory layers. “What does it mean to be accepting and tolerant of others,” he says. “I think it’s giving people room for their contradictions. You need to embrace people in their complexity.” (Link available to premium members.)
VIDEOS TO SEE.
David Blaine on the psychology of magic: David Blaine is an illusionist and endurance artist. He’s done stunts where he was buried alive for a week, endured two days inside of a large block of ice, hung upside down for 60 hours, and caught a .22 caliber bullet fired from a rifle with just a small metal cup he held in his mouth. In this podcast episode, Blaine explains that understanding the psychology of magic is way more important than the tricks. (Link available to premium members.)
Kevin Rose on investing during a pandemic: Serial entrepreneur and investor Kevin Rose explains how he’s personally navigating the stock market during this pandemic. He says one bucket of his portfolio is super-safe, slow-growth bets. Another percentage of his net worth is invested in something he believes will thrive in a post-pandemic world. This is a really insightful conversation. (Link available to premium members.)
Shonda Rhimes on the democratization of storytelling: Television titan Shonda Rhimes believes that good stories will stand the test of time. The stories she tells on TV discuss issues that are universal and transcend cultures and life experiences. They help us know that “we’re not alone in the world,” she adds. “That essence of storytelling is never going to change.” But what will change is the perspective through which stories are told. “[In TV], we’re still far, far behind reflecting the real world,” Rhimes says. “When you look through another lens — when you’re not the person normally in charge of things, it just comes out a different way.” (Link available to premium members.)
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